Jesus in America

Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2009 Jesus in America Claudia Gould Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Cultural History Commons, and the History of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Gould, C. (2009). Jesus in America: And other stories from the field. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jesus in America and other stories from the field Jesus in America and other stories from the field Claudia Gould Foreword by Lee Haring Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 2009 Claudia Gould All Rights Reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 USUPress.org Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-87421-759-9 (paper) ISBN 978-0-87421-760-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gould, Claudia. Jesus in America : and other stories from the field / Claudia Gould ; foreword by Lee Haring. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-87421-759-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-0-87421-760-5 (e-book) 1. Religious fiction, American. 2. Parables. 3. Ethnology--Fiction. I. Title. PS3607.O884J47 2009 813’.6--dc22 2009034622 Contents Foreword, Lee Haring 1 Jesus in America 7 A Red Crayon 29 The Mountains of Spices 35 Personal Storage 63 A Moment of Rapture 73 Jack at the Mercy Seat 85 Afterword 109 Foreword Lee Haring Readers of novels won’t let fiction be fiction; they want it to give them fact. The most degrading habit of radio or television inter- viewers is urging some novelist like Philip Roth to admit that his characters are “really” disguised versions of characters he has known. We first use novels, of course, to find out whether there’s anybody else out there, but our second, lifelong use for them is anthropological. Novels and short stories are windows through which we observe other people’s “manners, customs, observances, superstitions” (W. J. Thoms’s constituents of folklore). Conversely, when readers think, anthropology should be anthropology, they mean the writer should conform to a rhetoric they recognize: an encyclo- pedia-article summary of people’s customs, geographic situation, and economic circumstances, followed by extended analyses of kin- ship relations, preferably in tabular form. When Carlos Castaneda began publishing his series of pseudoanthropological narratives in the 1960s, readers were divided. One set were beguiled by the appropriateness of the teachings of Don Juan to their spiritual needs; the other set, much smaller, said, “Where is the group for whom this character speaks? Where are any tokens of real field experience?” Evidently “the traditional rationalistic and scientistic paradigms” (Kremer 1992, 201) needed just such a challenge as Castaneda posed, to enable a new hybrid to become part of the accepted genre system. Ethnographic fiction is a phrase rather like deconstruction, something people quickly acquire so that they can make their own abusive definition of it, then use it as a weapon against those they don’t agree with. They can take a concept or image some professional uses, which the critic thinks is contrived or lacking a real referent, and dismiss it in statements like “culture is itself an ethnographic fiction.” Internal to the discipline of anthropology is the equally contemptuous use of the phrase to mean something formerly 1 2 Jesus in America accepted by professionals, but now exploded, like the supposed ignorance of non-Western people about where babies come from. That is not the ethnographic fiction in this book. Seen more cor- rectly, ethnographic fiction is a technique for recasting field notes. An author uses the familiar rhetoric of the short story or novel as a means of palatably conveying what was discovered in the field. The classic example, assigned to many anthropology students before the genre got its name, is Return to Laughter, Laura Bohannan’s novel about the Tiv in Nigeria. For it she adopted the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen, so that no colleague, dean, or student would think she was offering such an engaging, well-written fiction as “real” ethnography. But “real” field experience lay behind it, as it does behind the stories in this book. Then instructors began assign- ing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, whose author, in an admi- rable exposé of cultural convergence, quite deliberately addressed readers with information about Igbo culture. Once instructors had become accustomed to this generic boundary-crossing, they were able to perceive Zora Neale Hurston as its pioneer. Whereas Hurston obliges her reader to notice how involved she is with her informants, Claudia Gould limits her visibility. In a partly autobiographical Afterword, she reveals that these are “her people,” in the precise sense of that phrase that they would understand: her rela- tives and their neighbors in Morganton, North Carolina. In fact, her choice to write fiction, rather than a monograph on “the place of Protestant Christianity in the lives of North Carolinians,” mani- fests her dedication to her extended family and others. She makes the difficult decision not to write “straight” ethnography, because she can bring more of herself to serve them through writing fiction. But hasn’t fiction always been ethnographic? What is Robinson Crusoe if not a study in unaccommodated man, recreating a class- based society? Balzac consigned an entire writing life to his ethnography of the emerging Paris bourgeoisie, initially calling it “Studies of Customs.” Flaubert proclaimed himself an ethnographer of Rouen in his subtitle Scenes of Provincial Life. To update Balzac, whilst narrowing the population being studied (in harmony with contemporary anthropological trends), became the mission of Marcel Proust in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Among British novel- ists (Fielding and Trollope leap to mind as reporters from the prov- inces), the most outspoken ethnographer is Dickens, whose Mr. and Mrs. Veneering “were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings Foreword 3 was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their car- riage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new . .“ Thomas Hardy soon explained the method: “Under the general name of ‘Egdon Heath,’ which has been given to the sombre scene of the story [The Return of the Native], are united or typified heaths of various real names . .” It’s commonplace for readers now to look for and find the precise geography in Ulysses, the intellectual history in The Mandarins, the ferocious sociology in Main Street, and the nostal- gic biographical-literary history in A Moveable Feast. Claudia Gould, insisting by her example that realistic fictions are a legitimate genre of scientific writing, expands the concept of ethnographic fiction. In “A Red Crayon,” for example, the images of hellfire and brimstone purveyed in church are not merely a metonym for child- beating, which the community’s values accept as a legitimate part of the duty of a churchgoing father. The images are themselves the abuse, in both this story and “Jack at the Mercy Seat.” The girl (the narrator as child) who has borrowed a crayon from Sunday school comes to feel like “the biggest sinner in the world.” But the author does not oversimplify. Abusive childrearing in these two dimensions isn’t accepted by everyone in the community. Neither the girl’s mother nor her Sunday school teacher participates in the girl’s self-condemnation; the mother takes the child out of Sunday school, and ever after, the narrator has stayed away from church. This is a divided community, then, even in the religion its members think is their truest basis for unity. Expanding the discipline of anthropology by incorporating social criticism, psychology, and sociology of religion with her own self- fashioning, Claudia Gould firmly situates herself as a creative writer who works from ethnographic and autobiographical materials. As part of her expanding program, she addresses the old belief that to tell a story must mean some sort of resistance to ethnographic reality. Now that narrativity has become a viable, indeed central term in much criticism (Ricoeur 1985; Greimas 1970, 1983; Herman 1999), the chink in the wall is growing larger. Through her pieces, she contends that the familiar short-story style, without postmodern derangements of time or switchings of point of view, will evoke the reader’s traditional expectation, based on realism, that here’s a way to find out what these people are like. Her method calls up the fea- ture of her subjects that people most often expect from folklore, an 4 Jesus in America orientation to the past. “Personal Storage,” for instance, portrays a woman who can’t be distracted by financial troubles from her attachment to her old furniture and family papers. Where her trea- sure is, there is her heart also (Matthew 6:21). The reader, identify- ing with the Farm Home Administration worker who passes on her story, is as appalled as he is; conflicts of value, we see, are part of the manners and customs of this population. Claudia Gould invents a monologue that captures the social reality of this imagined character’s attachment to the past, a character who is not a folksinger, storyteller, or quilter, but no less a product of Southern culture.

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